How do you enter a roadless area?

How do you enter roadless
lands in the West? Quietly, with a walking staff, a sketchbook, a
camera? Not according to the Bush administration: It enters with a
chainsaw.

On Aug. 7, loggers arrived at the Mike's Gulch
timber sale in the Siskiyou Mountains of southern Oregon, fired up
their chainsaws, and began cutting trees. Not an extraordinary
event in the timber country of the Pacific Northwest, but this is
no ordinary logging show. Mike's Gulch is on the border of the
Kalmiopsis Wilderness Area, and is an inventoried roadless area on
the Siskiyou National Forest. This timber sale is the first logging
to occur in an inventoried roadless area anywhere in the United
States since Bill Clinton issued a policy protecting these areas in
January 2001.

A brief history is in order. In the last
1990s, a coalition of wilderness advocates, big game hunters,
salmon fishermen and research scientists convinced President
Clinton that it was time to consider strong protections for
roadless areas in national forests. The Clinton administration then
undertook the most extensive public input process for any land-use
decision in U.S. history. When it was done, over 1.5 million public
comments had been received, and more than 95 percent of them
favored strict protections for roadless areas. President Clinton's
Roadless Rule was issues on Jan. 12, 2001, in the last week of his
presidency. It declared 58.5 million acres of roadless areas
essentially off-limits to road-building, logging or other
development.

On his first day in office, President Bush
suspended the rule and called for further review. Throughout Bush's
first term, the administration continued to pay lip service to
protecting roadless areas but refused to defend the Roadless Rule
in court and hacked off key elements, for example by denying
roadless protections to Alaska's huge Tongass and Chugach national
forests. Finally, in May 2005, the administration repealed the
Roadless Rule and threw the issue to the states -- but the policy
reserved the final decision on roadless areas for the Forest
Service chief.

In Oregon, the state's answer was
immediate. Gov. Ted Kulongoski announced his intention to petition
for full protection of roadless areas. He also joined the governors
of Washington, California and New Mexico in a lawsuit challenging
the legality of Bush's Roadless Repeal.

Meanwhile, the
Forest Service had been busy planning a massive salvage logging
program in the area of southern Oregon's Biscuit Fire, which burned
over 300,000 acres in 2002. Ignoring a moderate salvage proposal
that was acceptable to environmentalists, the Forest Service
proposed instead the largest single logging plan in American
history: over 500 million board feet. For the first time ever, this
plan renounced protections for inventoried roadless areas and
old-growth forest reserves set aside under the Northwest Forest
Plan. The final plan adopted by the Forest Service approved the
logging of 370 million board-feet, including over 8,000 acres of
inventoried roadless areas and over 6,000 acres of old growth
reserves. The Forest Service team leader who developed the rejected
moderate logging plan described the underlying agenda this way:
"They don't care about the [timber] volume. They want to get into
the roadless areas. They want to poke environmentalists in the
eye."

The Bush administration was also prepared to poke
the governor of Oregon in the eye. Despite the pending lawsuit by
Kulongoski and three other governors — due to be decided soon
— and despite the impending November due date for the states'
petitions on management of roadless areas, the Bush administration
refused to wait. Logging the Mike's Gulch roadless area, and nearby
in an old growth reserve, has begun.

Like the rest of us,
the Bush administration must be judged by its deeds, not its words.
While the words speak of states' rights, forest health and respect
for public process, the deeds tell another story. That story is a
tale of unwavering commitment to the interests of timber companies
and other resource extraction industries. If you would speak to the
Bush administration in opposition to that agenda, it makes no
difference whether you are a private citizen or the governor of a
state. You have no voice. Who could hear, anyway, over the whine of
the chainsaws?

Pepper Trail is a contributor to
Writers on the Range, a service of High Country
News (hcn.org). He is a wildlife biologist and writer in
Ashland, Oregon.